


The Closing Shift

by lebearpolar



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dean/Cas Tropefest 5k Mid-Winter Challenge, Fluff, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 01:20:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14321424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lebearpolar/pseuds/lebearpolar
Summary: Dean likes his job at Novak's Gourmet Grocers. He likes his coworker Cas even more.





	The Closing Shift

If you'd asked Dean two years ago what job he thought he'd be working while putting himself through community college (which was also far from a given), he'd have said mechanic, maybe bartender or fast food attendant.

He'd definitely never have guessed that at twenty he would find himself working at a gourmet grocery store specializing in locally grown, usually organic produce and home-baked baked goods. But somehow, here he is. And honestly? He kind of loves it.

Dean found Novak’s Gourmet Grocers through his best friend Charlie, who’s already worked there through two summers and one winter break. Charlie goes to some nerd private college upstate, but she dutifully comes home for every school vacation. Dean really appreciates this, because between realizing that all his high school friends were total douchebags and eagerly dropping them all after graduation, and the fact that he now spending 95% of his time either working or studying, leaving him zero free time to meet people, Charlie is pretty much Dean’s only friend.

Which is why, when Dean got laid off from the restaurant where he spent last summer bar backing, he jumped at the chance to apply to the fancy-ass grocery store Charlie’s always told him so much about. He figured that even if it sucked, he'd be getting paid to hang out with his best friend, and he couldn't see any downsides to that.

And now that he's worked there for almost six months — even after Charlie went back to school after summer vacation, he stayed on through the fall and now into the winter — he has to admit, he really does like it. The work itself isn’t all that intellectually taxing, to be sure, but it’s varied and rarely boring. In the course of one particularly productive six-hour shift, Dean washes vegetables, ices cookies, prints and folds brochures, cleans and reorganizes the spice shelf, and helps three separate tottering old ladies carry their groceries to their cars.

And that’s not even counting the hours he spends behind the register, ringing up and chatting with a range of customers who—contrary to his initial expectations—are not all rich, white, and snobby, but rather quite diverse, usually friendly, and often even very interesting to talk to.

Things aren’t quite so exciting these days, however. It’s early December now, the temperature outside fluctuates between frigid and glacial, and practically every other day the sky dumps two more feet of snow onto the ground.

Inside the store it’s toasty warm but deathly slow, time moving at a pace as glacial as the weather outside. The one saving grace for Dean is that Charlie is finally home for winter break. If it weren’t for her company, the slow days would probably have bored him to death by now.

At the moment, Dean is watching the clock tick down… closer… closer… finally the second hand reaches the 12, and his shift is officially over. Dean stretches luxuriously and cracks his neck. He glances over at the other register, where Charlie is dozing into the mixed nuts she’s supposed to be bagging up.

“Hey,” says Dean, tapping the counter. “It’s two. We’re free.”

Charlie snaps awake and yawns hugely. “Thank God,” she says. “I need to sleep for like a year.”

The two of them have been here since 7am, and they’ve both been fading steadily since their thirty-minute lunch break over two hours ago. They were up late last night glued to their PlayStation controllers; Charlie made Dean promise that they wouldn’t quit until they won at least one Fornite match… which didn’t end up happening until almost 2am. Almost exactly twelve hours ago, Dean reflects as he stifles another huge yawn.

Unlike Charlie, though, he doesn’t have the luxury of falling into bed as soon as he gets home. Dean has to pick Sammy up from school at three, finish roughly four hours’ worth of homework in less than two, then whip up something moderately edible for Sam to eat before running off to his six o’clock class.

But just as he’s wondering whether the Tuesday morning shift is even worth it, he is reminded why it definitely is. His favorite part of the day has arrived in the form of Castiel Novak, who slouches into the store with a travel coffee mug in hand and a pair of sunglasses.

Dean’s stomach does a little flip-flop, but he keeps his face stoically blank as he watches Cas trudge up the stairs into the main part of the store. “Hey, Cas,” Dean says brightly, his exhaustion forgotten in a moment. Cas rewards him with a smile of his own and removes his sunglasses, revealing those bright blue eyes that always make Dean a little weak at the knees.

Cas is the son of the store’s owner, the elusive (and very rich) Mr. Novak, but you would never know it from his demeanor. He shows up every day in wrinkled clothes, always looking like he just rolled out of bed. On the few occasions when Dean has met Mr. Novak, he found the man to be pretentious and superior; Cas, however, is neither of these things.

On the contrary, he seems even more rundown than the rest of the employees—which is really saying something, as Novak’s Gourmet Grocers seems to specialize in hiring perpetually exhausted twenty-somethings. Cas doesn’t talk about his home life all that much, but from what Dean’s pieced together over the last several months of working together, Cas took the fall semester off from college for unknown reasons and his dad has been all but forcing him to work at the store full-time.

“Hey, Dean,” he says now, stifling a yawn of his own. “Sorry I’m late… overslept…” He runs a hand through his hair, further disarranging his already very messy bedhead. Still yawning, he trudges towards the back room to clock in.

Dean watches him go, unconsciously leaning forward over the counter to keep Cas in sight, until something very rudely hits him square in the face. “Ow!” He looks down and picks up an almond from the counter. “What the hell, Charlie?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to actually hit you,” says Charlie, not sounding sorry at all. “But dude. Seriously.”

“What?” says Dean, confused.

“You!” Charlie exclaims. “Him! Dean, you’re so obviously—”

“Shut up!” Dean hisses, as Cas reappears, looking slightly less rumpled now.

“Anything interesting so far today?” he asks, leaning up against the counter in front of Dean.

“Nah,” says Dean. “We had this rich lady who reamed us out for like ten minutes about how rubbery her carrots were, but eventually she let us just give her a refund. Other than that… the usual. Just busywork.” He gestures at Charlie, who holds up a bag of nuts to demonstrate.

Cas nods disinterestedly. “Well,” he says, “you two can go. Victor’s still on break but he says he’ll be done any minute. You look dead on your feet anyway.” He looks Dean up and down and raises his eyebrows. “Up late playing video games again?”

“We wouldn’t have been up so late if Dean didn’t suck so much,” Charlie says sourly as she pushes out from behind the register.

She and Dean argue all the way back into the break room, where they walk straight past Victor, who has earbuds in and studiously ignores them both, and into the locker room to clock out and grab their stuff.

Dean’s parked right out front, so they head back through the main floor on their way out. “See you guys,” Cas says with a little wave as they walk out. Dean waves back and almost smacks into the doorjamb. Ducking his head so Cas can’t see his crimson face, he escapes out into the street, a cackling Charlie in tow.

“Jeez, Dean,” Charlie says as she settles into the passenger seat of Dean’s Impala. “This thing you have for Cas is getting out of hand. You almost just bashed your head in.”

“Shut up,” says Dean, and cranks the music. 

* * *

Dean has not always had a crush on Cas. In fact, when Dean first started working at Novak’s, he didn’t like the kid at all. Castiel was quiet, grumpy, and perpetually late for his afternoon shifts, in turn making Dean late for all the other crap he has to get done throughout the course of his day.

But the longer Dean worked with Cas, and the more he got to know him, the more his initial dislike softened. Cas can be a little surly, to be sure, but he’s polite to every single customer, even the assholes. Cas will bend over backwards just to make sure that they have a good experience. Dean might put this down to Cas just wanting to please his father, except that he’s seen Cas’s face when he feels like he’s let down a customer, whether by screwing up their bakery order or promising the availability of some vegetable that ends up arriving a week late. Pure devastation.

After a month or two of working with Cas, Dean started looking forward to spending shifts with him, and then even to seeing him for five minutes during the shift change. And now…

Well, and now Dean has a conundrum. Because he likes Cas. He _really_ likes Cas, but Cas is a closed book. Cas likes him as a friend, to be sure, but Dean has no freakin’ idea if Cas likes him like that. Hell, he doesn’t even know if Cas is into guys. It’s not like they ever talk about personal stuff like that. They talk about the store, and school, and books, and whatever weird science article Cas happened to read that morning.

Dean could ask him. In fact, Dean knows that that’s the sensible thing to do. What’s the worst that can happen? Cas is horrified by Dean’s interest, cuts him off entirely and refuses to work with him ever again. Dean has to quit the store, go out looking for some other job that lets him schedule his hours around class and homework and Sam, and in the meantime he won’t be able to afford his tuition, or his PlayStation Plus subscription, and he’ll have to beg his dad for a loan and get treated to a diatribe on how to manage his finances…

No. Telling Cas isn’t an option. Dean will instead carry on as he’s done for months now, trying and failing to force his heart to calm the hell down when Cas walks into the store, and throwing himself into school and work in an attempt to bury the ache in his chest that arises whenever his and Cas’s shifts don’t align for more than a few days. It’ll be totally fine. 

* * *

“Okay,” says Victor, winding a scarf around his neck. “I don’t want any interruptions tonight. If you have a problem, figure it out yourselves. If you have an emergency, call the cops. Tonight I’m unavailable. Off the grid. Incommunicado. Got it?”

Dean and Charlie nod.

“Good,” says Victor. “Now I’m going to go cook a phenomenal anniversary dinner for my fiancée, and remind her why she’s so madly in love with me. See you kids tomorrow.”

It’s another slow day, so Dean and Charlie while away the hours dusting, folding brochures, and having a lively argument over which character is going to die in _Infinity War_. When it finally comes time to close, they clean up in record time, Charlie sweeping as Dean starts to close the register. But instead of happily churning out the day’s report, the machine instead beeps angrily at him and an unintelligible error code appears on the screen.

“Shit,” Dean breathes.

“What’s up?” Charlie wanders over, still clutching her broom.

“It won’t close,” says Dean, pointing at the screen. “Look.”

“Let me look at it,” says Charlie, shoving him aside. She glares at the unruly register, restarting it, pressing every button she and Dean can think of, but nothing works. The error screen still blinks incessantly at them.

“I think we have to—”

“We can’t call Victor,” Dean says. “He’d kill us.”

“Well, who else then? We can’t leave without closing the registers.”

Dean puts his face in his hands, mentally running through the list of potential helpers. It’s a very short list.

“Hey, how about Cas?” Charlie suggests.

“Cas?” Dean thinks it over. Cas does know more about the store about any of the rest of them, having been working here on and off since middle school. It stands to reason he might know how to fix this. Dean takes his phone out of his pocket, but hesitates. He’s never called Cas before.

“Do you want me to call him?” Charlie asks.

“No, no… I got it…”

Cas answers on the first ring. “Hello, Dean.”

“Uh, hey,” Dean splutters, caught off guard by the quick response. “We have a register problem here, we were wondering if you knew what to do…”

Luckily Cas has run into this error before, and he calmly explains the steps to take to fix it. It isn’t as hard as Dean feared; all they have to do is go into the office and restart the POS program on the computer. He’ll tease Charlie relentlessly later; what kind of computer genius doesn’t think to turn it off and then on again?

Dean hangs up when they’re all done, his heart still racing unnecessarily. He leans against the counter to steady himself.

“Dude, you have a problem,” says Charlie, shaking her head.

Dean swallows shakily. He’s starting to agree with her. 

* * *

The weather remains remorseless as they get deeper into December, the temperature dipping into the teens every night as snow clouds continue to hang gloomy in the sky. Dean and Cas close together on one frigid night. It’s been a good shift, despite the cold: reasonably busy, and one of the rare shifts Dean gets to spend entirely alone with Cas.

It’s easy to talk with him when it’s just the two of them, really almost as easy as talking to Charlie. Dean tells Cas about his schoolwork, and the games he’s been playing lately, and Cas regales Dean with reactions to the complicated philosophy books he apparently reads just for fun.

Dean can’t understand more than half the concepts Cas references, but he loves the intensity of Cas’s interest as he waxes rhapsodic about things like universality and individuation. And more than that, it always blows Dean away that Cas wants to share all this information with _him_ , of all people. And when Dean tells Cas about his own life, whether he’s relaying what he learned in one of his classes or what an awesome job Sam did on a recent school project, Cas always listens and interjects with the same genuine interest he displays when talking about his own favorite subjects.

After their shift is over, they walk out together, heads bowed and hands shoved into their pockets. “See you tomorrow,” says Dean. Cas gives him a little wave, and they part ways, Dean heading towards his car, parked on the street. Cas goes the opposite direction, as usual; Dean’s always assumed he has a special owner’s parking spot out back.

But as Dean cruises down the street a few minutes later, he spots a familiar silhouette trudging along the sidewalk in front of him. He rolls down his window, frowning. “Hey, Cas!” he calls.

Cas looks up, his face pink with cold. “Dean,” he says, sounding unhappy. “Did you need something?”

“Where’s your car?” Dean asks. There’s no one else in the street, so he slows down to match Cas’s pace.

“I, uh, don’t have one,” says Cas, avoiding Dean’s eyes.

Dean can’t believe this. He’s seen Cas’s dad show up to work in no fewer than three separate cars, each of them outrageously expensive. “Why don’t you drive one of your parents’ cars?” he asks, nonplussed.

“I don’t mind taking the bus,” says Cas, not answering the question.

“Okay, dude, but it’s like two degrees out here. Can I give you a ride?”

Cas keeps walking for a moment without answering. Then, suddenly, he swings around and gets into the passenger seat. He sits there, shivering, while Dean accelerates down the street.

“I don’t know where you live,” Dean says after a minute of silence.

Cas quietly directs him to the opposite side of town from where Dean lives, and soon they’re driving through a sea of McMansions. They finally turn into a driveway at least half a mile long, and pull up next to a house roughly the size of Hogwarts.

“You live here,” says Dean, looking through his windshield with awe.

“Uh huh.”

“And you… how do you not have a car?”

“My dad says I shouldn’t drive until I can buy one for myself,” Cas mumbles. “And I just haven’t been able to afford one.”

“How many cars does your dad have?” Dean asks.

“Four.”

“Dude. That’s fucked up.”

Cas shrugs. “He’s teaching me to be responsible. Nothing is handed to you in real life.”

“He’s teaching you to freeze to death,” Dean says acidly, earning the tiniest chuckle from Cas. “Hell, even my deadbeat dad gave me a car.” He pats Baby’s steering wheel affectionately. “Had to fix her up myself, but still.”

Cas smiles slightly. “That’s nice. It’s a beautiful car.”

He gets out of the car, but hovers in place for a moment without shutting the door. He leans down, just slightly into the car, and meets Dean’s eyes. “Thanks for the ride,” he says.

Dean nods. “Any time.”

Cas smiles again, a soft smile that Dean’s not sure he’s ever seen before, and shuts the car door. Dean watches him go up the steps and let himself into the brightly lit house. He can’t imagine being that rich, and still having to take the bus.

Shaking his head, he turns back out of the driveway and heads home to his apartment. 

* * *

By the week before Christmas, Cas lets Dean drive him home after every shift together. These shared shifts are more frequent now, too, as Dean and Sam both have the week off from school, and Dean’s schedule is therefore much more malleable.

He learns why Cas took the fall semester off from college: Cas’s millionaire dad is forcing him to pay his tuition all by himself. Cas has perfect grades and an academic scholarship, but even so, even working as much as he possibly can, he just couldn’t come up with the money for this past fall. And instead of bailing his kid out, Mr. Novak the asshat just suggested that Cas come home, work at the store full-time, and try his best to scrounge up enough money to be able to go back to school at the end of January.

Cas still doesn’t know if he’ll have saved enough in time to go back. He tells Dean as much one night in the Impala. Dean’s fingers tighten on the wheel. If Cas goes back to school, he’ll be five hours away. Dean won’t see him in person until March at the earliest. He hates the idea of Cas being so far away for so long; just the thought of it makes his stomach contract uncomfortably.

Two seconds later he feels like a total asshole. Of course Cas should go back to school; the guy spent a whole hour yesterday extolling the virtues of Descartes. He clearly belongs in academics, in a way that Dean never has.

“When do you find out?” he hears himself asking. “If you’ll be able to go back?”

“The first week in January, I hope,” says Cas. “The semester starts on the twenty-second.”

Dean is quiet. January 22nd is less than a month away. His mouth is suddenly very dry.

They pull into Cas’s ridiculously long driveway, and Dean slows to a halt outside the front door. Cas makes to get out of the car, but Dean reaches over and grips his wrist. He lets go almost immediately, but he holds Cas’s gaze with his own.

“If you go back—when you go back,” Dean says slowly, terrified at his own daring, “we’ll stay in touch, right? We’ll text each other and… and see each other when you’re back in town?”

Cas gives him a sad smile. “Of course, Dean. We’ll stay in touch.”

“Promise?” Dean sounds like an insecure child, needing to be soothed.

“Promise,” says Cas. He raises his right hand, holding his pinky finger out to Dean. Dean hooks his own pinky around Cas’s, and they stay like that for a full thirty seconds, their fingers entwined, their gazes locked.

An owl hoots loudly outside, and the two of them break apart. Cas walks into his house, but Dean remains in the car for several more minutes, a pit growing in his stomach.

* * *

The day after New Year’s, Cas sends Dean a three-word text: “I’m going back.” 

* * *

Dean never knew three weeks could go by so fast. The hours blur into days, until suddenly he’s standing in the break room, numbly watching Cas pack up the contents of his locker into a backpack. His bus leaves first thing in the morning.

“I’ll text you when I get there,” says Cas, straightening up.

“Okay,” says Dean. His heart is pounding in his ears. The pit in his stomach now feels more like a black hole, like it might swallow up all of his insides if he isn’t careful. Cas is leaving, and he hasn’t told him. What does he have to lose now? Whether he tells Cas how he feels or not, Cas is still going to leave. He should do it. Just in case, just on the off-chance that Cas might possibly feel the same way.

But some force seems to have glued his lips together. He says nothing as Cas swings his backpack over his shoulders, nothing as Cas unexpectedly pulls him into a tight hug.

They’ve never hugged before. Dean closes his eyes and allows himself to enjoy this feeling, this sensation of being closer to Cas than he ever has been before—

But then Cas pulls back and, with great reluctance, Dean follows suit. Cas gives him a lopsided smile. “See you around, Winchester.”

“Yeah,” Dean croaks. “See ya, Cas.”

Then Cas is gone, and Dean is bereft. 

* * *

The pit in Dean’s stomach doesn’t go away. Rather, it seems to fill up with his sadness and regret, until it feels like a great rock is sitting in his stomach instead, weighing him down, threatening to pull him right through the floor of the Impala.

What is wrong with him? Why couldn’t he just open his stupid mouth and tell Cas how he feels? It’s pitiful, really. Pathetic. Dean has never been so disgusted with himself, not even after that Thanksgiving when he ate four slices of pie in one sitting.

Dean isn’t paying much attention to where he’s driving, so it catches him by surprise when he realizes that he’s halfway to Cas’s house. He must have been on autopilot, his brain subconsciously following the route he’s followed so often over the past month.

Dean takes a deep breath. His anxiety is screaming at him to turn around, head for the safety of home, but for once he doesn’t listen. Not this time. Instead he lowers his foot on the gas pedal, and the Impala jumps forward, racing towards Cas as though it, too, desperately wants to see him.

Dean almost chickens out when he pulls into Cas’s driveway, but he steels himself. He has to do this; he’ll never forgive himself if he doesn’t.

He makes his way up to the Novaks’ front door. With every step, he feels like he’s about to pass out. But he makes it. Squeezing his car keys in one hand for courage, he reaches up and rings the doorbell.

The great wooden door creaks open to reveal Castiel, wearing pajamas and looking confused. “Dean?” he says. “What are you doing here?”

“Um,” says Dean. “Um. I have to tell you something.” His mouth is bone dry. His voice cracks.

“Okay,” says Cas, sounding concerned. He opens the door wider. “You should come inside—”

“No!” Dean says, surprising them both with the volume of his voice. “I mean,” he adds, more quietly, “I’d rather we stay out here. If that’s okay.” Cas steps out onto the front step, hugging himself for warmth. Dean realizes dimly that it’s freezing out, and Cas isn’t wearing shoes, but in his muddled state he doesn’t know what to do about that.

“Cas,” he says, because if he beats around the bush he’ll never say it, “Cas, I like you.”

“I like you, too, Dean,” Cas says, bemused. “That’s what you came here to tell me?”

“No.” Dean shakes his head, frustrated that Cas isn’t understanding. “I _like_ you, Cas. I like you so fucking much. I want—I know you have to go, but I don’t want to lose you, I can’t lose you.”

Cas is very quiet. Dean tries to read his expression, but Cas’s face is in shadow. “You…” he finally says, quietly. “You like me? As in… _like_ like?”

It sounds so middle school that Dean could burst out laughing if he wasn’t trying so hard not to puke. _“Yes,”_ he says breathlessly.

“Oh,” says Cas. And then, without warning, he’s backing up into the hallway, golden light spilling out from the house onto the front step. Dean takes an involuntary step forward, reaching out a hand uselessly. “My bus leaves really early tomorrow,” Cas is saying. He sounds muffled, as though he’s contracted a cold in the last thirty seconds. “I have to get some rest. I’ll see you later, Dean…”

And he shuts the door in Dean’s face. 

* * *

If Dean was miserable before, it’s nothing compared to how he feels now. He drags himself out of bed the next morning, but only because he has to work; otherwise, he would stay in bed for days. Hell, he’d let the bed swallow him whole.

He feels like his body weighs a ton. It’s a huge effort to put one foot in front of the other, to raise his arms, even to raise his head. He still feels nauseous.

Dean sits down in the break room and wonders if he’ll ever be able to get up again. He’s numb all over, so it takes him a few seconds to register that his phone is buzzing in his pocket. He pulls it out and freezes at the name on the screen: Castiel Novak is calling him.

Dean almost doesn’t answer it. He almost throws the phone on the floor instead. But he doesn’t. Moving in slow motion, he drags his finger across the screen and holds the phone up to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Dean, thank God,” says Cas’s voice. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t answer.”

“I almost didn’t,” Dean says. “Listen, can you make it quick? I’m about to start my shift.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” says Cas. “Dean, I’m so sorry about last night. The way I reacted… that must have been terrible for you.”

“Uh huh,” says Dean. He doesn’t feel like he needs to elaborate.

“Dean, listen,” says Cas. There’s a lot of noise in the background; he must be on the bus. “Dean, I like you too. I’ve liked you for months and months, but I never—I never thought you might like me back.”

Dean doesn’t know what to say. His brain has jammed.

“Those things, those wonderful things you said,” Cas continues, “I never expected you to say them. I’ve never… done this before, never been with anyone, ever. I was in shock, I guess, after you came to see me. But it’s worn off now, and… Dean. Dean, say something. Please.”

Dean is quiet for a long time. “I like you, Cas,” he breathes, finally.

He hears Cas’s sigh of relief even over the noise of the crowded bus in the background. “I like you, Dean,” Cas says.

“Well,” says Dean, “ain’t that something?”

Cas laughs, and Dean finds himself laughing with him. “Hey, Cas,” he says, when the two of them have finally fallen silent. “How long until spring break, again?” 

* * *

The day Cas is due to come home from school dawns gray and cold. It’s mid-March, but the weather remains steadfastly wintry; there’s snow forecast for later. Dean stands behind the register, his mind wandering. Only two hours to go before he gets to pick Cas up at the bus station. He can’t wait.

The bell above the door tinkles, and Dean shakes himself out of his stupor. “Hello, how are—” He stops dead. Cas is standing in the doorway, wearing a huge winter coat and grinning from ear to ear.

“Your bus—” Dean begins.

“I lied,” Cas says brightly, walking into the store. “So that I could surprise you.”

Moving slowly, like a sleepwalker, Dean drifts out from behind the register. He and Cas meet in the center of the floor, and Dean drinks Cas in. It’s been six long weeks since he’s seen Cas’s face in person; viewing it on a computer screen just doesn’t compare.

“Hey,” says Dean.

“Hey,” says Cas.

Dean doesn’t know who reaches out first; all he knows is that suddenly he’s kissing Cas, finally, _finally_ , and it’s the most glorious thing in the world. Someone coughs behind them, and Dean and Cas disentangle themselves to see Victor standing at the back of the store, his arms crossed and eyebrows raised. His gaze is approving, though, and a second later he winks at them and disappears into the break room.

Dean looks back at Castiel, who is beaming. “So,” says Cas, taking Dean’s hand in his own. “You need any help closing the store?”

“I’d love some,” says Dean.

Cas laughs, and kisses him again, and together they walk further into the store to fetch the broom.


End file.
